Party

Raises bewilderment to an art form ... Tim Key in Party by Tom Basden. Photograph: Pete Le May

There are pitfalls when comedians make theatre. Sometimes they strive too hard to be serious; sometimes (judging by the reviews of last summer's The School for Scandal), they don't strive hard enough. The 2007 If.Comedy award winner for best newcomer, Tom Basden, sweeps all such considerations aside with his new play about student politics, an idiosyncratic and highly enjoyable piece performed beautifully by a crack cast of upcoming comics.

It's light on plot, but funny enough for that not to matter. Four dopey students have assembled in wannabe leader Jared's shed – summerhouse, he claims – to draft a manifesto for their right-on new political party. The fifth attendee, Duncan (Edinburgh Comedy award champ Tim Key) has been invited because his dad runs a printer's shop, which is handy for marketing. But Duncan cares less for campaigning than for the lemon drizzle cake.

This generation of comics is much given to childlike behaviour in their own work: Josie Long is all sticky-tape and crayons; Anna Crilly and Katy Wix (who both star here) make like delinquent infants in their sketch shows. Basden so exaggerates his characters' petulance and political ignorance that they're no longer remotely plausible as adults. These are people who go tongue-tied when asked to talk about climate

But who cares about credibility when the style is this seductive, and the jokes this good? The script bears the hallmarks of Basden's standup: witness nuggets such as "What is pillaging?" "It's somewhere between rape and theft." There are echoes of Brass Eye, too, in the ridiculously binary foreign policies: "Are we for or against China?" Elsewhere, the script simply gets out of the way, leaving the stage clear for extraneous comic business, such as the oddball sequence in which Duncan fills right to the brim everyone else's glass of water.

Party is like Camus's Les Justes restaged by precocious Sunday school pupils. The satire is slight, but stealthy – not least in the suggestion that democracy as reinvented by simplistic idiots still passingly resembles the system now in use, or the play's hint that, if you started politics from scratch these days, the first thing you'd consider would be branding. These points are lightly made, in a production by Phillip Breen that is chock-full of gags and charisma. You wouldn't want this lot running the country. But comedy-wise, they get my vote.